Where Reality TV Meets 'Reality by Decree'

It's 2004 and, despite my best intentions, I'm a pop-culture junkie. While my one-year-old daughter is napping, I watch an episode of a new reality TV show, The Apprentice, hosted by New York real estate mogul, Donald Trump. The show's premise: Sixteen to eighteen individuals, divided into two teams, test their business acumen by competing in a series of moneymaking challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump calls the losing team into an ersatz boardroom where he delivers his signature tag line, "You're Fired!" to the individual he determines most guilty of gumming up the works.

I remember noting what seemed to me an unprecedented televised celebration of US capitalism with its corresponding culture of authoritarianism and non-empathy. Before ordering contestants out of the boardroom, Trump denounced each one with epithets such as stupid, terrible, or loser, all while the camera zeroed in on the very face of human shame and vulnerability. After viewing a few harrowing instances of this, I turned the damn thing off.

During the last decade or so, I've watched from afar as The Apprentice gave rise to Celebrity Apprentice, finally plopping Trump dead center in our political theater. When Trump won his run for the White House in 2016, I, along with most of the country, blinked in bewilderment, asking, How the f#%k did this happen?

Shows like The Apprentice, along with toxic right wing radio and Fox News, did much to reflect and bolster a culture of Americans who see humanity as inherently greedy and who regard empathy as being for losers and wimps.

If Trump excelled in reality TV, he is now shoring up to master what I'll call reality by decree. In Trump's world, truth is plastic and entirely relative; events and facts become true once they're rubber-stamped—announced—by right-wing news outlets like Breitbart or Fox News. Each time Trump decrees a fake-fact such as Obama wire-tapping Trump Tower or "illegal immigrants" stealing the popular vote—each time he distorts reality and is not held accountable for doing so—he rules reality by decree.

There are indeed psychological implications of Trump's reality by decree. Since his presidential win, there has been ubiquitous discussion of the impact of a Trump presidency on survivors of social trauma: this is because social trauma rests on a distortion of reality.

As social primates, we humans rely on a shared reality principle, a collective sense of what is factual or fictional, just or unjust. The fabric of our shared reality is unthreaded each time someone who has power over us abuses that power, destabilizing our reality by creating a world in which notions of truth are relative, mercurial, and unstable.

Trump purposefully manipulates the truth like a street performer twists balloons into animals. With each new bizarre and menacing decree, trauma survivors feel unable to hold onto a vision of a rational and just world where people wielding tremendous authority and power are held accountable for their words and actions.

We women wince upon hearing about Trump's "locker room talk," mortified even more when he decrees his own "tremendous respect for women." Survivors feel gaslighted, driven into a world where everything is profoundly unpredictable and unsafe.

Trump's reality by decree—while common under dictators—is unprecedented in US history. Each day, we awaken into an Orwellian dystopia in which the "Ministry of Truth" controls not just the material and political conditions of life, but also the conditions of human perception.

Perhaps it is we, survivors of rape, incest, and other abuses, who especially sense the steadily emerging danger associated with power-driven reality distortion. Maybe we of the the women's and queer liberation movements have a key role to play in fighting against Trump's blatant attempts to deny an objective ground for truth and justice.

US president Donald Trump creating an Orwelian dystopia and a poor example for the youth

Tania Advani

Maybe my once napping toddler—now a young woman of fourteen—will join...